June 2000 - Nr. 6
German Heritage in Canada
by Alidë Kohlhaas
Part 33
German state-sponsored emigration
In
the 18th century, some German states hired their men out as
mercenaries to Britain to fill their empty state coffers. These often
forcefully conscripted men, accompanied by a considerable number of women,
came to fight a war in North America. Many stayed at its end to start a new
life, some in the newly founded United States of America, others settled in
the various British North American colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, and a
few in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
A century later, many German states, once again short of money, were willing to pay the Americans and the British indirectly to take their poor. They found it would cost them less to subsidize mass emigration than to feed their impoverished citizens, who appeared to threaten the very social fabric of German life.
For many people today, the idea of poverty in the German states in the early 19th century seems hard to believe. To them, poverty was endemic only in Germany after WWI, when the Kaiser’s "well-ordered" government collapsed, and unfamiliar democracy struggled unsuccessfully to come into existence. There is a good reason for this mythical image of a happy peasantry living in well-ordered states. The Germans had no popular writers of the stature of Charles Dickens, who wrote like him about poverty and social conditions with both humour and affection, as well as a sharp eye for detail. There was no Tiny Tim, no Little Nell, no Oliver Twist or a David Copperfield to capture the imagination of mid- 19th century Germans, or those of today. These characters, as well as the characters created by the Brontë sisters, even now inform us without political propaganda, without angst-ridden philosophizing of what it was like then in Britain.
There, many of the harsh conditions Dickens described came about through the industrial revolution. In the German states they were the result of too many wars, fought with or against Napoleon, because of self-indulgent rulers, continuous land division because of inheritance laws, and because of unusually cold weather that brought about the failure of crops. The Germans, particularly in the south-western states, were starving. The industrial revolution had not yet reached this "bucolic" world; hence there were no jobs in the cities for the impoverished peasants and tradesmen.
In the Kingdom of Württemberg, for instance, during the budget year 1848-49 every 29th citizen depended on either state welfare or on the kindness of his community. In Stuttgart alone, 12,000 beggars were recorded. In today’s terms that would mean two per cent of the population of that city, which is now around 600,000. In pre-industrial Stuttgart, when its population was probably less than 100,000, this would have made poverty extremely visible. In the Duchy of Baden in 1850, 1.3 per cent of the total population desperately needed state assistance. There were many more, who received assistance directly from their communities. Almshouses were filled in both states, as well as in Hesse-Darmstadt, and probably other states.
At the same time as these once prosperous peasants and tradesmen fell into poverty, German writers were concerned with politics and the unification of their states into one unit. Some wanted a republic, others a federation ruled by an emperor. Then revolution ripped through many of the states in 1848-49. During this revolution, for instance, Baden’s grand duke was disposed and then reinstated with the help of Prussia. Writers either romanticized a mythical past, or they wrote political tracts. Many had to flee abroad.
Prior to the revolution, Karl Marx began his radical writings at the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne in 1842, criticizing political and social conditions. Forced to resign, he continued his writings from Paris, where he was ordered to leave in ‘45. For a while he settled in Brussels, where he began to organize a network of revolutionary groups. Then his Communist Manifesto appeared in ‘47. Governments began to worry. Württemberg’s consul general in New York, consequently wrote to his government "it cannot very well be denied that in view of the ever wider spreading of communist ideas the emigration of the poorer part of the population at the expense of the communities would be just as beneficial for the country as for the emigrants themselves."
The Baden and Württemberg legislatures introduced state support for assisted emigration of individuals and the resettlement of whole communities to North America. Each set aside 50,000 Gulden for this purpose, although this amount would soon be far exceeded. From Baden alone, in the years 1850-55, 159,582 individuals left for the promised land. While up to 1846 Baden had a natural increase of around 0.9 percent, in 1855 it showed a decrease of 3.5 per cent in its population.
When the German states opted for assisted emigration of their population, British North America was the low man on the totem pole of desirable places to send them. The top of the pole was the USA. Eastern Europe, especially Hungary as part of the Austrian empire, South America and Australia lay somewhere in-between. The reasons for this lay in part in the past–in false impressions and wrong descriptions of what it was like in our part of the world-and in part they lay in German chauvinism.
To be continued . . .
Comments to: alide@echoworld.com
